How Wholeness and little me Jive

THE BLOG

Talking to myself again

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Occasionally I find it helps me to understand what’s going on in my life and in my practice – and also to move on - if I write things down. Essentially, like when I’m working on song lyrics, what I’m doing is talking to myself – and then, if I think they might be interested in it, I sometimes share what I’ve written with a handful of like-minded friends, like you guys.

Below this one, there are three in-depth and quite long posts that come into that category. The first is a light hearted post ‘on being Ernest’, then there’s my view on whether Zen practice can be dangerous – and finally, especially for those of you who have seen some of my Old Man Calling videos on You Tube, there’s a post called, ‘Moving on from ‘two realms’ to ‘one mind cycling in the moment’. You guys will know what I mean. Enjoy!

On being Ernest

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According to Ancestry UK, ‘Ernest is a traditional male given name of German origin, meaning "serious," "resolute," or "battle to the death". Derived from the Germanic word eornost, it signifies sincerity and determination, often associated with the classic, vintage, or "earnest" nature of the name. It is frequently shortened to the nickname "Ernie".

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Because we spend a lot of time together and because I often talk about what I’m thinking about to my lovely partner, Harriet, she is privy to much of my internal dialogue. Luckily for me, she continues to love me through thick and thin and we know each other so well that very little ever surprises or phases her. As anyone who knows Harriet knows, she’s the best!

This morning, after ten minutes or so, listening to my passing contemplations on some internal newsreel, a quietly revealing moment arose. It made us pause and led Harriet to wryly observe that, ‘You should have been called Ernest’.

I really take her point; it’s true, I can be a rather serious, sincere and determined person at times, especially when it comes to sharing the highs and lows of meditative awareness, which I love doing.

You see, for me, life and (meditative awareness) practice are one and the same thing. What’s going on in life is exactly the same as what’s going on in a Zen-inspired meditative awareness practice – and I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Zen is all about cutting to the chase - and I love it! Anyone who has read about it’s origins or studied Zen teachings will know that Zen is famously ‘direct’, It cuts right the heart of the matter – focusing from day one on Realization – seeing life just the way it is - and undermining and seeing through whatever stands in the way of it. So while other schools of meditation offer perfectly valid paths to enlightenment, Zen is a path OF enlightenment, directly shouting, ‘Wake up!’, you’re already here/now! What’s the problem? Wake up!’

Unfortunately, for anyone who resists this uncompromising and undeniable wake up call to reality, the person they casually call ‘I’ or ‘Me’ turns out to be the spanner in the works; the fly in the ointment; the unpromising mud that a lotus flower may or may not grow out of – in other words, the problem!

When it comes to realization, I get into trouble because I regularly identify as a person called Trevann – It’s almost as if it’s programmed into the way I think. And the familiar life I live as that person that we all know and love, is very different to what shows up whenever I surrender to Presence. When the observer and the observed are One, all is well in the world. Whereas, whenever I identify as Trevann, all sorts of problems can crop up – and they often do!

As many meditation teachers have observed over the years, ‘The life of a seeker is making one mistake after another’. That’s because, they are saying, the problem is the seeking. A better question to ask, they point out, is, ‘who is it that is seeking?’ Realisation, the teachers say, rests on a matter of identity; and probably the biggest challenge in Zen practice is letting go of that ego-based everyday identity that we all hold so dear, and seeing through the illusion of there being an abiding ‘Me’ running the show.

Can Zen practice be dangerous?

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A friend of mine, seeing the way I was struggling with this recently, said, ‘This is dangerous! What you’re doing is dangerous!’ And, as they said that, I had a strong sense that what they really wanted to say was that I was doing something that could be damaging to other people - and that I should stop it, immediately!

I have to say that I agree with my concerned friend to the extent that Zen practice, when it reveals the nature of life itself freed from any mind-created illusions, - in other words, once you get what I recently read my teacher of 50 years ago, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, once described as the ‘knack’ of surrendering to presence - it will inevitably undermine any belief you might have that you are a separate individual ‘self’.

And, given that we are all so attached to who we think we are, that can be a very disorientating and uncomfortable experience.

Having considered what my friend said, all I can say is that there are other people like me around, people who choose to embrace that ‘identity’ challenge and for whom the amazing wonder of life and the discipline of practice with all of its ups and its downs are one and the same.

And, at the same time, I agree, Zen practice is not to be taken lightly! It’s designed to turn your life upside down!

For me, it’s not a question of banning Zen practices. But, I do agree, it is important to warn off anyone who might decide to casually dabble in it without realizing that Zen is a very powerful and life-changing path of realization and not just another feel-good activity or a casual way to spend a quiet few minutes online.

I’m pretty confident that all is well, because it’s been there for a few years now but, following that conversation with my friend, I intend to double-check that the 180 people who follow me on my Old Man Calling You Tube channel are fully aware of what they are getting into if they do the meditative awareness exercises I post on that channel.

I’ll make a video covering what we’ve been talking about here and warn any casual scrollers that those Zen-inspired meditative awareness exercises are inherently ‘dangerous’ in that they are ultimately designed to turn your life upside down – but, at the same time, I’ll acknowledge the great connections I made via You Tube with other people like me who, in the name of realization, love the challenge of seeing through that illusion of having what Buddhists call, ‘an abiding self’.

Given fair warning, everybody gets to be fully informed and hey are table to make their own choices.

Moving on from The Two Realms

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Check back soon

Once posts are published, you’ll see them here.

Remembering that ‘The life of a seeker is made up of one mistake after another’, those of you who are still engaged with this lengthy bout of in-depth sharing might like to hear about my latest mistake. And, if it turns out that I’m only talking to myself again, that’s absolutely fine! I like a bit of quiet contemplation. Onwards and upwards!

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If you’ve tried any of the meditative awareness exercises on my Old Man Calling You Tube channel, you’ll know that I usually begin the videos by pointing out two distinct ways that you and I engage with life; conceptually and via consciousness. And I give these two ways of engaging with life their own ‘realms’, calling one Everyday Mind and the other Presence

I stopped posting anything new on that channel a couple of years ago when I became increasingly unsettled; concerned that the model of Mind I was using – those two realms – no longer ‘fitted’ with my practice of surrendering to presence. I began to feel increasingly ‘stuck’, lost and conflicted.

Distinguishing between a conceptual engagement with life; ie thinking and interpreting everything that happens - and the freedom and beauty of aware consciousness and Presence - is something that I’ve been into and adapted since the 1970s. That same distinction was a key part of the Personal and Social transformation seminars that I took part in between 1982 to 1990 - and it has served me very well for many years. But in 2025 I had a growing sense of being deeply ‘stuck’ – and that was very painful.

I struggled with having 2 contradictory and mutually exclusive senses of identity. At one point, for better or for worse - and I certainly don’t recommend that you do this! - I decided that ‘I had taken that way of looking at life as far as it would go’ and I needed to find something new, whatever it took. Much painful struggling and scrabbling around ensued, as I looked for some sort of insight into what was going on - and found a ‘new’ way forward. Of course, I had absolutely no idea ‘where to go or what to do’.

Becoming increasingly desperate and yet determined, I decided to ‘throw everything up in the air’ and to look again at all the choices I had made over the years - to see what showed up when I prised opened those closed doors.

What arose – surprise, surprise! -was a steady stream of relationship and inner conflicts - and my sense of self-esteem fell through the floor until, in the middle of what became a very challenging time, I found what, it turns out, I had been looking for.

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Some of you may know that I collect wise words and quotes for my The Song of Life fb page. So, my fb feed is full of everybody from Ram Das to Robert Adams and what they said – and I read anything that seems interesting and pertinent.

Anyway, one day I came across a post from the Living Zen fb page and it caught my attention. It turned out to be one of five in-depth posts outlining the Buddha’s teachings on Dependent Origination. I won’t bore you with all the details – you can always join the Living Zen group and read those articles for yourself – but by the time I’d studied and contemplated all five posts and then taken them for a ‘test-run’ through aware consciousness, I had begun to move on from that Two Realms model of how mind works – and sensed that I was one step closer to accepting that there is no ‘abiding me’, with or without its own realm in Everyday mind.

The two realms became one - a cycling mind - and those passing images, fleeting imaginings and momentary memories and the bundles of thoughts that come up moment by moment were just that – and not reminders of some ongoing ‘real’ situation that some abiding me called ‘I’ needs to deal with.

The proof of the pudding, as always, is in the eating and I’m very happy to report that this latest mistake, based on the Buddha’s teachings on Dependent Origination, tastes good!

As things settle down, the wise words I’m drawn to these days are, more often then not, to do with mindfulness, impermanence and continuous practice.

Perhaps I’m becoming a Zen Buddhist in my old age!